Multilingual Mac

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

After a long hiatus for redesign, the excellent Typophile site is back online, including all its earlier discussion posts. It's a first class resource for info and discussions about fonts of all sorts and font creation apps. The new format includes special "communities" for Arabic typography, blackletter, color fonts, Hebrew typography, and variation fonts.

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Traditionally full support for "complex scripts" like Devanagari in MacOS and iOS has required the use of special AAT fonts supplied by Apple. The much more common OpenType fonts for such languages used by other platforms would not work right.

While I have not seen anything directly from Apple, typography experts tell me that the Core Text API of Sierra and iOS 10 now supports the specs of the Universal Shaping Engine (USE). The result should be that Apple devices can use a much wider variety of OpenType fonts for the large number of languages which use these scripts. For more info on the USE, see

Saturday, October 29, 2016

I have not seen any comments from Apple about it, but the China Apple Store is showing a keyboard for the new Macbook Pro which has a number of different markings than the normal US keyboard. Also the Hong Kong store lists a new keyboard -- "Chinese - Pinyin" -- in addition to the usual English International when you configure a new Macbook Pro.

My tests indicate this new keyboard reflects the way the Sierra Pinyin - Simplified Input Source works when the option to switch back to US via Caps Lock has been activated.

Presumably it also has the new Siri support and Chinese/Japanese fonts mentioned in this page.

One useful feature -- the ability to easily set the Format Language to something other than the System Language -- has been removed in Sierra. A workaround for this using the Command Line can be found here.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Apple’s ABC Extended keyboard layout ((formerly called "US Extended") lets you type a vast number of accented and other special latin characters. The standard reference for its codes is here. Unfortunately this reference is missing the following deadkey shortcuts which have been added at some point in recent years.

Sunday, February 21, 2016

While playing with the latest update for Word for Mac 2016, 15.19.1, I thought the level of support for Arabic/Hebrew seemed considerably better. Not only are Arabic characters connected, but the cursor starts at the right and moves properly along with the text, changing fonts doesn't seem to cause problems, punctuation goes in the right place, vowels work, text is inserted where the author expects, etc.

So far there is still no direction control button or menu, and copy/paste from other sources may result in incorrect word order. Also changing the color of the text can mess up chracter order.

I've seen rumors that the next update, 15.20 is supposed to have additional improvements and fixes.

As my knowledge of Arabic/Hebrew is extremely limited, I'd be grateful for comments from readers with better capabilities regarding the usability of this app for such scripts.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Keyman, which has long helped Windows users add special keyboards to their machines, is now available in a beta version for Mac. The app required for users to make custom keyboards themselves is still only for Windows, but the OS X version of Keyman Desktop lets you download a large number of keyboards from the existing Keyman and SIL libraries.

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

When using a hardware keyboard with the iOS 9 device, you need to go into Settings > General > Keyboard > Hardware Keyboards and match the layout with whatever your keyboard's key printing is. Unfortunately Apple supplies only a limited selection of such layouts, so it's possible an exact match may not be possible. For example, if your keyboard requires the British PC layout, you are out of luck. I think only one normal iOS keyboard has no hardware layout at all: Tamil.

The 9.2 update to iOS released December 8 includes the following language fixes and added features:

- Improved punctuation input on the 10-key Chinese (Pinyin & Stroke) keyboards with new expanded view of punctuation symbols and better predictions - Fixing an issue on Cyrillic keyboards where caps lock would be enabled when typing in URL or email fields - Siri support for Arabic (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates)

Sunday, September 20, 2015

It appears that with iOS 9 Apple has changed the standard hardware keyboard shortcut for switching among keyboard layouts. Instead of the Command + Space used forever by earlier versions of OS X and iOS, it is now Control + Space.

(This is now also the default shortcut for keyboard switching in OS X 10.11)

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Users who would like to try having their keyboard layout switch automatically depending on which of two hardware keyboards they are using (e.g. a Macbook's internal keyboard or another one), should have a look at these possible solutions using the Karabiner app.

After applying an update of 8/11/2015, my Word for Mac 2016 suddenly displays connected Arabic script in a new document (not a doc created by Windows Word). Is this for real? It's been 14 years folks are waiting.

I'd welcome reports from readers regarding how complete this new support is.

Saturday, July 11, 2015

The release version of Word for Mac 2016 was provided to Office 365 subscribers July 9. My initial tests indicate there is still no support for RTL scripts like Arabic (letters are disconnected), but Devanagari seems to work if you use Apple's Kohinoor font.

A list of the Proofing Tools included can be found here. I think its accuracy is suspect, since it includes Persian (for which input is definitely not supported) and several Indic scripts (Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil).

For Arabic/Persian there is a kludge workaround which may meet the needs of some users described here.

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

The iBooks Author 2.3 version released June 19 includes 2 new templates for the creation of ebooks in the epub 3 format. This is important because the iBookstore requires that books in a number of languages use that format (and not the .ibooks format that was the only option in earlier iBA versions). Also epub 3 format can normally be read on a variety of platforms, unlike the .ibooks format which is restricted to Mac.

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

The new Chinese system font PingFang is designed for a modern appearance and crisp onscreen readability in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese.

Enhanced keyboard input.

Inputting Chinese using the keyboard has never been simpler or faster, thanks to advanced learning capabilities that quickly memorize your word choices, an improved language prediction engine that better anticipates the words you’ll type next, frequently updated vocabulary lists that contain the latest words and phrases, and a smarter candidate window that displays more character selections.

Improved trackpad handwriting.

Enter characters on the trackpad as swiftly and accurately as you do on paper — just by using your finger. A new Trackpad window reflects the proportions of your physical trackpad, gives you more room to write, and lets you write multiple characters in a row.

Japanese:

Live conversion for keyboard input.

OS X El Capitan dramatically improves the ease and speed of entering Japanese text. With an enhanced vocabulary and improved language engine, it automatically transforms Hiragana into written Japanese as you type — eliminating the need to press the space bar for individual word conversions.

New fonts.

OS X El Capitan includes four new Japanese fonts — Klee, Tsukushi A Round Gothic, Tsukushi B Round Gothic, and YuMincho +36p Kana — and more weights for the Hiragino Sans font that add personality to your documents and presentations.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

A poster in the Apple Support Communities has pointed out that Apple's Bangla fonts (Bangla MN and Bangla Sangam MN) do not display the combination r plus khanda ta correctly. The r character is put over the preceding character instead of over the khanda ta.

The Ekushey Bangla fonts for Mac (Solaiman Lipi/Rupali) can be used to have proper display.

Thursday, April 30, 2015

To provide an additional challenge to Yosemite users, with the 10.10.3 update Apple has decided to change the name of the item in the Edit menu for most apps long called "Special Characters". Clicking on this brings up the Character Viewer where you can access all Unicode characters.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

According to the Apple Watch User Guide, the Apple Watch language is set independently using the Watch app on the iPhone, via My Watch > General > Language.

As of 4/24/15, the available languages are English (U.S.), English (UK), English (Australia), Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), French (France), French (Canada), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong). This is rather less than the 40 supported by the iPhone.

Voiceover is reportedly available in all the 14 languages listed above.

I have seen a report that the Music app supports Russian in addition.

The dictation language for a contact is determined by the iphone keyboard normally used in the Message app for the contact.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Some users may want to replace the fonts used by OS X for menus and dialogues, especially for non-Latin scripts like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Thai. For a tool that can be used to do this, see this page.

Friday, March 6, 2015

I did a quick test with the preview of the new Word 2016 for Mac which was released by Microsoft March 6. Arabic input was not connected and the characters ran in the wrong direction. So it looks like the long-requested support for RTL text is still missing.

On the other hand, support for Indic scripts looks much improved: Hindi conjuncts and vowel reordering were displayed correctly, which has not been the case in earlier versions.

Comments from readers who are able to give this app more thorough tests would be most welcome.

Monday, February 16, 2015

I recently found 14 new Arabic fonts in Yosemite under Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts/iWork Arabic Support. These must be installed manually before they become available in iWork and other apps. Some of them seem to have potential legibilty problems when viewed in this rudimentary Pages 5 test page:

Monday, February 2, 2015

Although Apple fails to say so in the notes for the update 10.10.2 released Jan. 27, this includes a fix for the bug in the Kotoeri Romaji keyboard which removed the ability to make accented characters like é by using the normal Option key shortcuts. This capability has now been restored, which should please users who want to write in W. European languages while still in Japanese input mode.

My guess that that Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Persian, Malay, and Urdu are excluded because the iBooks app does not yet support the right-to-left page turning they require. Burmese and Lao could be because proper line breaking is not possible.

From a separate list of "supported" languages it appears that in addition no books in other Indic scripts are currently accepted -- Devanagari, Gujarati, Bangla, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Telugu.

It's not clear why Indic scripts and Amharic are not accepted. As far as I know Pages and iBooks Author support composing in them, and the iBooks app can display them OK.

Edit 3/20/15: I have evidence that at least one Devanagari book has been accepted in the iBookstore.

Monday, December 22, 2014

Earlier this year I had not been able to get the integrated translation feature which is supposed to be present in iOS 8, at least for Safari, to work, but now it does, and some instructions for setting it up can be found at